Cross-Border Payments in the EAC: Why Sending Money Across a Border Is Still Harder Than Sending It Across a City

For millions of East Africans, sending money across town has become almost effortless. A few taps on M-Pesa in Kenya, Airtel Money in Uganda, MTN MoMo in Rwanda, or Mixx by Yas in Tanzania, and the money arrives in seconds.

Try sending that same money across an East African Community (EAC) border, however, and the experience changes.

The transfer may cost more. It may take longer. In some cases, it isn't even possible directly without using a bank, a remittance service, or another intermediary.

That disconnect is becoming harder to ignore. East Africa has spent nearly two decades building one of the world's most successful mobile money ecosystems, yet moving money between neighbouring countries remains far more complicated than moving it within them.

The interesting part is that this is no longer a technology problem. The infrastructure to move money already exists. The bigger barriers are regulation, interoperability, and the way different financial systems continue to operate within national borders.

A Region That Already Solved Domestic Payments

Before looking at the gaps, it's worth recognising how much East Africa has already achieved.

Across the region, mobile money has become everyday infrastructure.

In Kenya, M-Pesa processes billions of dollars in transactions every year and has become the default payment method for individuals, merchants, and businesses alike.

Uganda's MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money dominate everyday transactions in much the same way. Tanzania's mobile money market is shared between Mixx by Yas (formerly Tigo Pesa), M-Pesa, Airtel Money, and HaloPesa, while Rwanda has built a similarly mature ecosystem around MTN MoMo and Airtel Money.

Across these markets, paying salaries, school fees, utility bills, transport fares, and small business suppliers digitally has become routine rather than remarkable.

That maturity has allowed fintech innovation to move beyond payments into lending, insurance, and investment products through embedded financing. 

Tanzania also demonstrated what interoperability can look like. Since 2021, customers using different mobile money providers within the country have been able to transfer funds directly between wallets without worrying about which network the recipient uses.

It is exactly the kind of experience users increasingly expect.

Where the Experience Breaks Down

The problem starts the moment money crosses a border.

A Kenyan using M-Pesa still cannot send money as easily to someone using Mixx by Yas in Tanzania as they can to another M-Pesa user in Nairobi. Even when cross-border transfers exist, they often involve additional fees, multiple intermediaries, or longer settlement times.

For users, it feels inconsistent.

For businesses, it becomes a genuine obstacle.

The irony is that the countries involved belong to the same regional bloc, trade with one another every day, and have spent years promoting economic integration.

Yet their payment systems remain far less connected than their roads or transport networks.

Why Crossing Borders Is So Much Harder

The obvious explanation is technology.

The real explanation is regulation.

Each country has its own anti-money laundering (AML) requirements, know-your-customer (KYC) standards, foreign exchange rules, consumer protection laws, and licensing frameworks.

Those rules do not automatically recognise one another simply because countries belong to the East African Community.

Currency adds another layer of complexity.

A payment moving between Kenya and Tanzania involves the Kenyan shilling and the Tanzanian shilling. Depending on the payment corridor, settlement may still involve international banking systems and reserve currencies like the US dollar, introducing additional costs and delays into what is, geographically, a short-distance transfer.

In other words, the challenge isn't moving the money.

It's agreeing on how it should move.

Why It Matters More Than It Seems

For consumers, the inconvenience is obvious.

For businesses, the cost is much larger.

Small and medium-sized enterprises increasingly buy inventory, hire suppliers, and sell products across East African borders. Every additional payment fee, settlement delay, or reconciliation challenge adds friction to regional trade.

Cross-border payments also matter for workers.

Thousands of East Africans live, study, or work in neighbouring countries while supporting families back home. Sending money across the region should, in theory, feel almost as straightforward as making a domestic transfer.

Instead, it often resembles an international remittance.

That gap becomes even more significant as regional trade continues to grow under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

If moving goods across Africa becomes easier while moving payments does not, businesses still face a major constraint.

The Infrastructure Taking Shape

The encouraging news is that solutions are already being built.

One of the most significant is the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS).

Rather than routing payments through correspondent banks outside the continent, PAPSS aims to allow businesses and financial institutions to settle transactions directly in local currencies.

That reduces dependence on foreign currencies while lowering settlement costs and processing times.

The African Continental Free Trade Area is also creating political momentum.

Removing trade barriers becomes far more meaningful when businesses can pay suppliers across borders without unnecessary friction. Payments and trade are increasingly being viewed as two parts of the same problem.

Regional organisations such as COMESA have also been working on payment integration initiatives designed to improve financial connectivity across member states.

None of these efforts will produce overnight results.

But together, they represent an important shift away from isolated national payment systems toward genuinely regional financial infrastructure.

The Next Challenge for East African Fintech

The first chapter of East African fintech was about proving digital payments could replace cash.

That chapter has largely been written.

The second has focused on building services such as lending, insurance, and investment on top of those payment rails.

The third may be about connecting those rails across borders.

Cross-border payments remain one of the least developed parts of the region's fintech ecosystem despite their enormous economic importance.

For startups, banks, and regulators alike, solving this problem could unlock entirely new opportunities in regional commerce, SME financing, remittances, and digital trade.

Progress Will Be Gradual

There is no single announcement likely to solve cross-border payments overnight.

Building interoperability across multiple countries requires regulators, central banks, telecom operators, payment providers, and commercial banks to align around common standards.

That takes time.

The good news is that many of the technical foundations already exist.

The harder work is institutional rather than technological, creating rules that allow different payment systems to trust one another while protecting consumers and maintaining financial stability.

Progress is therefore likely to come corridor by corridor rather than across the region all at once.

The Next Infrastructure Story

Domestic mobile money transformed how East Africans move money.

The next transformation is unlikely to come from another wallet app or payment platform. It will come from making national payment systems work together as seamlessly as they already operate within their own borders.

Like many infrastructure challenges, cross-border interoperability is not especially glamorous. It won't generate the excitement of a new fintech launch or a billion-dollar funding round.

But once it is solved, it will probably feel obvious in hindsight.

The same way sending money across a city now feels routine, sending money across an East African border should eventually feel no different.

That may become the next defining chapter in East Africa's digital payments story.

What the FIFA World Cup Means for East African Fintech and Digital Payments

Every FIFA World Cup creates economic winners far beyond the teams that make it onto the pitch.

Broadcasters see subscription spikes. Betting platforms experience surges in activity. Restaurants and sports bars fill up for late-night matches. Millions of small transactions suddenly cluster around the same event.

East Africa offers an interesting case study this year. No country from the region qualified for the 2026 tournament, yet the region's fintech and payments infrastructure will remain involved in everything happening around it.

The more interesting question isn't who wins the World Cup. It's what a month of concentrated spending reveals about the digital payment systems that increasingly power everyday commerce across East Africa.

Why Global Sporting Events Matter to Fintech

A World Cup doesn't just change what people watch. It changes how and when they spend.

Viewing parties mean more spending at bars and restaurants. Betting markets see predictable surges in activity. Streaming and pay-TV providers gain new subscribers and renewals timed around kickoff. Across East Africa, much of that spending now flows through mobile money rather than cash.

That matters because it transforms entertainment spending into digital transaction volume.

A tournament of this scale effectively becomes a live test of payment infrastructure. When millions of people are topping up betting wallets, paying subscription fees, ordering food, or settling transport fares around the same matches, the systems underneath those transactions are pushed much harder than they are during normal periods.

Where the Money Moves

Merchant Payments

The most visible impact of the World Cup may also be the least discussed from a fintech perspective.

Sports bars, restaurants, hotels, and roadside viewing centres across Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, and Kigali typically see increased activity around major tournaments. Because mobile money has become the default payment method for much of this spending, a large share of that activity flows directly through digital payment rails.

The timing of this year's tournament adds another layer. With matches being played across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, many kickoffs fall late at night or in the early hours of the morning for East African audiences.

That shifts spending patterns toward late-night viewing parties, food purchases, transport fares, and other forms of commerce that increasingly depend on digital payments rather than cash.

Streaming and Pay-TV

The World Cup is also a subscription event.

Millions of viewers who might not normally pay for premium sports content often activate or upgrade services during major tournaments. Whether through pay-TV packages or streaming platforms, those payments increasingly happen through mobile wallets and digital payment systems.

The broadcasters may differ by market, but the underlying pattern remains the same: major sporting events generate concentrated bursts of recurring digital payments, providing another source of transaction volume for the financial infrastructure supporting them.

Sports Betting

Few sectors demonstrate the relationship between football and digital payments more clearly than sports betting.

The growth of online betting in East Africa has been closely linked to the rise of mobile money, which removed the need for physical betting shops and made deposits and withdrawals almost instantaneous.

That relationship becomes especially visible during major tournaments. Every deposit, wager, and withdrawal relies on the same payment rails supporting other parts of the economy.

The fintech story is not necessarily about which betting company gains the most customers. It is about the infrastructure underneath the industry. A World Cup played over more than a month creates sustained pressure on payment systems, making it one of the clearest tests of their reliability and scale.

Remittances

Remittances are another area worth watching.

Kenya receives roughly $5 billion annually from its diaspora, with the United States accounting for more than half of those inflows. While there is no published evidence yet linking the 2026 World Cup to higher remittance volumes, global events that attract significant diaspora attention often increase financial activity between migrants and families back home.

Whether that effect proves measurable this year remains to be seen, but it highlights another way global events can intersect with regional payment systems.

What the Tournament Reveals About East African Fintech

Step back from the football and a broader pattern emerges.

East African fintech increasingly functions as infrastructure rather than a standalone industry category. Whether someone is paying for a subscription, topping up a betting wallet, settling a restaurant bill, or paying for transport after a match, the transaction often moves through the same underlying digital payment systems.

Major events like the World Cup act as stress tests.

Normal daily transaction patterns rarely push payment infrastructure to its limits. A globally synchronised event with predictable demand spikes does. How well mobile money platforms and the services built on top of them perform during these periods offers a useful indication of how mature the region's financial infrastructure has become.

It also highlights how completely digital payments have become embedded in everyday life. A decade ago, much of this spending would have happened in cash. Today, a significant share is captured digitally, creating transaction records that increasingly influence everything from merchant analytics to alternative credit models.

Where the Infrastructure Still Faces Limits

The growth of digital payments has not eliminated every friction point.

Major sporting tournaments remain fertile ground for fraud. Fake betting tips, phishing campaigns disguised as streaming offers, and scam promotions designed to exploit heightened consumer activity tend to increase during these periods.

System reliability is another challenge. Payment platforms occasionally experience delays or downtime during periods of unusually high transaction volume, particularly when large numbers of users are attempting to transact simultaneously.

Cross-border payments also remain more complicated than they should be. A Kenyan and a Ugandan watching the same match can each spend digitally within their own markets with relative ease, yet moving money directly between mobile wallets across borders is often less seamless.

The technology largely exists. Regulatory and interoperability challenges remain the bigger obstacle.

The Bigger Story

The World Cup may be remembered for goals, upsets, and trophy lifts. For East Africa's fintech ecosystem, however, it also serves as a reminder of how deeply digital payments have become embedded in everyday life.

No East African team is competing this year. Yet every subscription payment, betting deposit, restaurant bill, and late-night boda ride tied to the tournament still runs through the region's financial infrastructure.

Beyond supporting world renowned players and teams, this is also football: a month-long demonstration of how mobile money and digital payments have evolved from financial products into essential infrastructure for the wider economy.

Beyond Send-and-Receive: How Embedded Finance Is Reshaping East African Fintech

For most of the last two decades, East African fintech has been focused on one challenge: moving money digitally without a bank branch involved.

Mobile money solved that problem. Across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda, digital payments are now part of everyday life, while governments have digitised everything from tax collection to public services through platforms like Kenya's eCitizen and Rwanda's Irembo.

The more interesting question today is what gets built on top of that infrastructure.

That is where embedded finance comes in, and why it may be one of the most important shifts happening in East African fintech right now, even though it receives far less attention than the original mobile money boom.

The Shift From Payments to Embedded Services

Embedded finance refers to financial services such as payments, credit, and insurance being delivered inside a product whose primary purpose has nothing to do with finance.

The distinction matters.

A standalone banking or wallet app asks users to come specifically because they want to perform a financial transaction. Embedded finance works differently. It meets users where they already are, inside a ride-hailing app, a device retailer, a farm-input platform, or an e-commerce marketplace, and introduces financial services within an activity they were already carrying out.

The practical effect is that the financial product fades into the background.

You're not applying for credit. You're buying a phone and paying for it over time. You're not taking out insurance. You're signing up for a service that happens to include it.

East Africa's Clearest Example

If you want to see embedded finance working at scale in this region, M-KOPA is the case to study.

The Nairobi-based company finances smartphones, and increasingly electric motorbikes, through small daily or weekly repayments made via mobile money. Customers do not need collateral, a guarantor, or proof of income. The device itself serves as security: fall behind on payments and it locks remotely; catch up and it unlocks.

The scale is no longer a pilot-stage story.

M-KOPA today:

• Nearly 10 million customers served across Africa

• More than $2 billion in credit disbursed

• KES 207 billion unlocked for customers in Kenya

• 4.8 million Kenyan customers reached

• Nearly four in ten customers received their first formal loan through the platform

• More than two-thirds received their first insurance cover through bundled products

This model works particularly well in East Africa because two conditions already exist. Formal credit remains limited, while mobile money is deeply embedded in everyday financial behaviour.

The World Bank estimates that only about a quarter of adults in low-income countries use formal credit at all. At the same time, mobile money usage is frequent enough that repayments can happen quietly in the background of a person's existing financial habits.

M-KOPA's own explanation is straightforward: each repayment becomes a data point, and enough data points become a credit history, built without a bank statement.

Where Else It's Showing Up

M-KOPA may be the most visible example, but the pattern is spreading across multiple sectors.

E-commerce and ride-hailing

Platforms are embedding wallets and buy-now-pay-later products directly into checkout experiences, allowing customers to finance purchases without leaving the app to engage with a separate lender.

Mobility fintech

Vehicle financing is increasingly being integrated into ride-hailing and delivery platforms, helping drivers access cars and motorbikes through the same applications that generate their income.

Agritech

Agricultural platforms are beginning to bundle insurance and credit into farm-input and market-access services, rather than requiring farmers to seek out separate financial providers.

Open banking

Much of this growth depends on the infrastructure beneath it.

Kenyan institutions including Equity Bank, KCB, and Co-operative Bank have expanded their API offerings, making embedded financial products easier to integrate and scale.

Kenya's central bank published a draft open banking framework in March 2024, with full compliance expected by the end of 2026. The framework formalises a level of bank-to-fintech data sharing that had, in practice, already been taking shape for years as mobile money normalised digital financial interactions across the country.

Why Investors Are Paying Attention

"Many investors are now seeing SME digitisation as the next major fintech opportunity in East Africa," says Joe Kiragu, Sybrin's Regional Director for East Africa.

"If you want to evaluate how an economy is growing, look at the SME sector and the middle class."

His observation helps explain why embedded finance, rather than another standalone payments app, is attracting increasing attention across the region.

Mobile money largely solved consumer payments. The remaining opportunities sit around the edges of that success: working capital for small businesses, asset financing for informal workers, insurance for first-time policyholders, and other financial services that remain inaccessible to large parts of the population.

The Rise of Alternative Data

Another factor making embedded finance possible is the way creditworthiness is being assessed.

Alternative data, including transaction histories, utility payments, and repayment behaviour, is increasingly standing in for the credit bureau records that much of the region's population simply does not have.

This is more than a technical adjustment.

It is the mechanism that allows financial products to be embedded into phone retailers, ride-hailing platforms, and other non-financial services. The platform itself becomes the source of the data used to make lending decisions.

Without that shift, many embedded finance models would struggle to function at scale.

Where the Model Still Faces Limits

The growth of embedded finance is not without challenges.

Interoperability remains a significant constraint. A financing or insurance product embedded within one platform does not necessarily move with a customer who switches to a competing service. Even when unintended, this can create forms of soft lock-in that limit consumer flexibility.

Regulation is also still catching up.

Kenya's open banking framework illustrates this dynamic. The country has spent years operating with varying degrees of data sharing between banks, telcos, and fintechs. Only now is a formal regulatory framework being developed to govern practices that have already become common in the market.

As Kiragu puts it, the region's payments layer is mature, but "the next level is moving from access to quality and embedded services."

That observation captures the current state of East African fintech well. Access is no longer the primary challenge. The focus is increasingly shifting toward the quality, depth, and usefulness of the services built on top of existing payment infrastructure.

Beyond Payments

It makes sense that embedded finance receives less attention than mobile money did.

There is no equivalent of a single breakthrough product in the way M-Pesa transformed digital payments. Instead, the shift is happening across dozens of platforms that are not primarily financial companies at all.

Yet that may be precisely why it matters.

Mobile money answered the question of whether East Africans could move money digitally. Embedded finance is beginning to answer a different question: who gets access to credit, insurance, and working capital, and under what conditions?

Increasingly, those decisions are not being made inside a bank branch. They are being made inside the apps people already use to work, shop, travel, and run their businesses.

The next phase of fintech growth in East Africa may not be defined by new payment rails, but by the financial services quietly built on top of the ones that already exist.

How M-Pesa Became the Backbone of Kenya’s Digital Economy

A single interaction in Nairobi can tell you everything you need to know about how money moves in Kenya.

A matatu conductor doesn’t ask if you have cash. He doesn’t even slow down the transaction. He simply says “M-Pesa,” types a number into his phone, and moves on to the next passenger while you finish calculating your fare. That small exchange carries shows what happens when a mobile money system stops being an option and becomes the default way people transact.

Nineteen years after its launch, M-Pesa has gone far beyond its original purpose of helping unbanked Kenyans send money. It now sits underneath a large share of daily economic activity in the country, shaping how people pay, save, borrow, and even prove their creditworthiness.

For anyone building fintech products in Africa, it also raises a useful question: what does real scale actually look like when a financial product becomes part of everyday life?

From a Simple Transfer Tool to National Financial Infrastructure

When Safaricom launched M-Pesa in 2007, the goal was narrow. Many Kenyans did not have bank accounts, but mobile phone usage was already widespread. The idea was to let people send money through basic phones using airtime-like transfers.

At the time, fewer than 30% of Kenyan adults had access to formal banking services. That gap between mobile penetration and financial access became the opening M-Pesa was built on.

The adoption that followed was gradual at first, then compounding.

By 2024, financial inclusion in Kenya had risen to 84.8%. M-Pesa now serves over 40 million monthly active users in Kenya and more than 70 million customers across markets including Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Lesotho, Ghana, and Egypt.

The scale shows up most clearly in daily usage patterns:

• Around 2,600 transactions are processed every second in Kenya

• In the financial year ending March 2025, M-Pesa moved about Sh38.3 trillion in transaction value

• It now contributes roughly 41.5% of Safaricom’s total revenue

What started as a money transfer service has effectively become a core layer of economic infrastructure.

The System Behind the System

The agent network

The part of M-Pesa most people interact with is digital, accessed through the phone. The part that keeps it running is physical.

Across Kenya, there are about 298,900 M-Pesa agents. These agents sit in kiosks, shops, markets, and rural trading centers. They allow users to deposit and withdraw cash instantly, bridging the gap between digital balances and physical currency.

This structure matters because it solves a problem many digital-only fintechs struggle with: cash is still deeply embedded in everyday African commerce. Without a physical conversion layer, adoption would likely have been far more limited outside urban centres.

Merchants and Everyday Commerce

M-Pesa also became embedded in business transactions much earlier than many other mobile money systems.

Today, around 633,000 businesses accept payments through Lipa Na M-Pesa. Alongside them are hundreds of thousands of micro-merchants using Pochi La Biashara, including motorcycle taxi operators, food vendors, and small kiosks.

For many of these businesses, M-Pesa functions as:

• A payment system

• A record of daily sales

• A substitute for formal bookkeeping

Over time, that transaction history has taken on a second life. Lenders and fintech companies increasingly rely on it as a proxy for income verification and credit assessment. In many cases, consistent M-Pesa activity is more useful than traditional bank statements, especially for informal businesses that never had access to them in the first place.

How M-Pesa Expanded Beyond Payments

Once payments became routine, Safaricom began layering additional financial services on top of the same infrastructure.

The pattern is consistent: instead of building separate systems, new products plug directly into the M-Pesa wallet and its transaction history.

Ziidi and Retail Investing

One of the clearest examples is Ziidi, a money market fund integrated into M-Pesa and developed with partners including the Nairobi Securities Exchange and Kestrel Capital.

It lowered the entry barrier for investing dramatically, allowing users to start with as little as KES 100.

The growth has been striking:

• About 130,000 users in September 2024

• Around 4.3 million users by March 2026

To put that in context, traditional collective investment schemes in Kenya serve roughly 300,000 people in total. Ziidi alone has surpassed that entire base.

Credit Built on Transaction History

Credit has followed a similar path.

Products such as Fuliza Biashara and the Taasi loans (Taasi Till and Taasi Pochi) are designed for small merchants who already use M-Pesa daily but lack formal credit histories.

Instead of relying on collateral or traditional credit scores, lending decisions are increasingly influenced by:

• Transaction frequency

• Cash flow consistency

• Wallet activity patterns

This shift has quietly changed what “creditworthiness” looks like for a large segment of small businesses.

Cross-border and Global Payments

More recently, M-Pesa has begun extending beyond domestic transactions.

A virtual Visa card linked directly to the wallet now allows users to pay for global services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. This removes the need for a separate bank-issued international card and brings global payments closer to the same interface people already use for local commerce.

Why This Matters Beyond Kenya

The trajectory M-Pesa has followed is increasingly relevant across Africa.

According to GSMA, the continent now has over 500 million active mobile money accounts processing more than $830 billion annually. At the same time, fintech revenue across Africa is projected by Boston Consulting Group to grow from around $10 billion today to over $65 billion by 2030.

But the growth opportunity is shifting.

Payments are already widely adopted. The larger gaps remain in:

• Access to credit (with over half of African adults still underserved)

• SME financing (with an estimated $330 billion funding gap)

• Savings and investment access for low-income users

This is where the next phase of mobile money expansion is heading: financial products built directly on top of payment systems that already reach mass adoption.

The Prevalent Gap

Even with its success, M-Pesa highlights some of the structural limits of Africa’s financial systems. The biggest challenge is interoperability.

A user in Kenya cannot seamlessly send money to a mobile money user in Tanzania, even though both operate within the East African Community. Different operators, regulations, and settlement systems still create fragmentation.

Regional efforts like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) and broader integration under the African Continental Free Trade Area are attempting to reduce this friction.

In many ways, the constraint is no longer technological. It is regulatory and institutional.

In SummarY

M-Pesa’s evolution offers a clear pattern: a system designed for basic money transfers can gradually become the backbone of an entire financial ecosystem when three things align: distribution, trust, and repetition.

What began as a way to move money without a bank account now sits at the centre of payments, lending, savings, and even cross-border commerce in Kenya.

The most interesting part is not the scale itself, but how it was achieved. There was no sudden leap. It was built through agent networks in kiosks, small transaction fees, and low entry thresholds that made participation effortless.

For the rest of Africa’s fintech ecosystem, M-Pesa serves as both reference point and warning. The next wave of growth is unlikely to come from payments alone, but from what gets built on top of them once they become invisible.

 How to Start A Career in Tech in Kenya

East Africa, and Africa as a continent is undergoing a series of revolutions that leave much to be anticipated about in its future development. The technology scene in Kenya is one of these hot spots of activities and innovations. Tagged as the “Silicon Savannah”, Kenya has been recorded as one of the African countries home to some of the best cutting-edge technologies on the continent. 

This intense spring of ideas and innovations has led many to consider breaking into the tech industry and technology as a discipline. However, just like every other field of expertise, the tech industry is not one to venture into without counting the costs. This article helps you gain insight into what to do and what to avoid in your quest to break into the technology hub in Kenya.

1. Identify the numerous aspects of the tech industry and decide on where you will focus on.

Just like in the Sciences or Arts, there are numerous specialties in the tech space that require careful study and appraisal of each one to know what fits best for an individual. Specialties like Software Development, Data Analytics, Cyber security, and Artificial Intelligence have taken precedence in the past years in Kenya. But, specialties like Health Tech, UI/UX, Game Development and Design, and Product Management are areas yet to be mined to their fullest capacity. To fully understand what size fits you, you must carefully explore what interests you or what you do best. This way, you will be in a better state to pick out your specialty of interest without pressure.

2. Attend professional training tailored to your specialty of interest

The introduction of technology has made the world a global village and quality education on any subject matter can be accessed from any part of the world.

To build a successful tech career in Kenya, you should take care of making the mistake of being a generalist with no deep expertise in any aspect of technology. This can be carried out by registering for conferences, attending seminars, and taking courses relating to your field of interest.

Not only will doing this open you up to the recent trends and Kenyan government policies regarding the tech space, but it will also create an avenue to network and build working relationships with people who are from the same field.

3. Explore local opportunities first

Although the influx of foreign intervention in the technology scene in Kenya might serve as a source of temptation to look out for foreign opportunities only, it is beneficial to also step back and look into opportunities made available locally. One of the resources to access to help with this is the innovation iHub in Kenya which has helped to connect many Kenyan tech enthusiasts with appropriate opportunities. 

Getting actively engaged in the activities of communities such as these will help you understand the local tech market in Kenya and how to maneuver your way successfully. After successfully gaining a firm stand in the local tech scene, then you can begin to consider spreading your reach and attempt to break into the technology industry in any other country, either in Africa or overseas.

4. Have an excellent job search strategy

One of the major milestones anyone successful in the tech scene has recorded is having a well-crafted job search strategy. This will involve starting from the lowest hierarchy for most or learning on the go for others. Both of these strategies require an iota of deliberateness and intensity for a tech enthusiast in Kenya. This is because the efflux and influx of different technology companies into the country might seem tempting enough to enable one hop from one employment to another - which is a vital sign of instability. To gain a strong foothold in the tech industry in East Africa and Kenya, you must ensure to be single-minded, strategic, and firm on what you want and how you will get it. This attitude will help you create a beautiful curriculum vitae when you step out in search of a position.

In your quest for an opening in the technology industry, your job search strategy should also include having spontaneous answers, ideas, and innovations that will help improve the future of tech in Kenya and in Africa as a whole.

The tech space in Kenya is one where you get to build your grit, resilience, and attention for excellence. Having the big break will most likely not happen overnight, however, by staying through with the decision you make from the start, you can become one of the many wonders of technology Kenya has ever produced. Kenya is increasingly becoming an attractive source of technological innovations and its impact on the economic environment in East Africa should not be overlooked.

References

1. Resilient Digital Africa, 26 March 2024, https://resilient.digital-africa.co/en/blog/2024/03/26/kenya-emerges-as-africas-premier-technology-market/

2. iHub Africa, https://ihub.co.ke/